New Jersey.- For four days, a 29-year-old woman attended classes, spent time in the guidance office and asked for the phone numbers of students who helped her find her way through the halls. The woman posed as a student at a New Jersey high school.
According to the students, the woman continued to send text messages to former classmates days after her true age was discovered.
The woman, identified by police as Hyejeong Shin, was arrested on Tuesday (01/24/23) and charged with providing false documents to officials at the New Brunswick Public School, a district with nearly 10,000 students in central New Sweater.
The incident, first reported by New Brunswick Today, raised concerns about security protocols in place to verify student identities, and the woman’s reason for breaking into a school that enrolls children as young as 15 in the first place. .
Aubrey Johnson, the school superintendent, told board members that the district would evaluate “how best to look for false documentation and other things. Neither the school nor police officials offered any information on a possible motive for his behavior.
Shin handed over a false birth certificate to school officials, a third-degree felony, according to a spokesperson for the city’s Police Department.
New Jersey schools are required to provisionally enroll all children in school, even in the absence of the records normally provided to verify identity or demonstrate community living.
From then on, students have 30 days to provide additional proof of identity, or the district has the option of declaring them ineligible to attend class, according to the superintendent.
“Once our staff determined that this was fraudulent information, they immediately notified the proper authorities,” Johnson said in a statement.
Shin has been banned from school grounds and students have been advised to cease all contact with her.
The story may seem like a throwback to “I’ve Never Been Kissed” and “Hiding,” PG-13-rated movies that featured the pranks of adults posing as high school students to report a news story and hide from the mob.
But New Brunswick high school students said they were concerned that the woman’s behavior suggested her motives were much less comedic.
Nearly a dozen students showed up at the Board of Education meeting prepared to voice their concerns about the incident, but were not allowed to speak.
The students told a New Brunswick Today reporter that Shin had requested to meet with at least a few people he met at a location outside of school.
A teenage girl, who gave her name as Tatiana, said that the night before the woman’s arrest, she received a text from Shin that left her fearful for her safety.
“All I wanted to do was make her feel comfortable in a new school,” he said.
“If you have the ability to forge documents, get into a school, have close contact with young students, you have the ability to do anything.”
Calls to a New Brunswick resident with the same name as the 29-year-old were not returned. Neither the New Brunswick mayor nor his spokeswoman returned calls.
